Now that I've posted finished pictures maybe no one cares about these details any more but whatever.
So indeed I hand-dabbed some more green paint onto the strakes. I experimentally removed the tape between two of them and again a bit of green was pulled up at the edge (although not nearly as bad as before). So then I remembered about running a knife along the edge of the tape before removing, and hey that worked pretty well. Here is the "best" view of the updated nose section.
Pretty good. I'm not gonna bother with the two edges that I messed up (again); enough is enough there. Note again the good color match between the vinyl and the paint. Note also that I haven't installed the nose block in there yet; I suppose now is the time.
Applying the window vinyl to the helixes was mostly uneventful; getting it positioned correctly was a bit finicky but no big deal. In hindsight, what I should have done was painted the entire top of the helixes green, and then used the edges of the final to create black/green border. How much easier that would have been! But in order to do that I would have had to make the vinyl pieces exactly the right size, and I didn't think of it then. As it is, they're just a bit smaller than the black area on the helixes, which means you can see the edge of the vinyl just inside the green, but it's no big deal.
The fin vinyl was fairly tricky, as expected. Two things saved me:
1) I accidentally made loads of extras of those pieces
2) The ability to get the vinyl to stretch and lay down into a gap with a hair dryer.
After the first one I figured out how to get it positioned, then apply down the portion on the body tube, then press the decal into the fillet, then apply the parts on the fins. I often still had a bit of air under the vinyl at the fillets, but that was taken care of by warming it up with a hair dryer and gently pressing it down until it softened up sufficiently that it would lay in there. On one piece I overworked it a bit and ended up with a couple of small bubbles underneath, but I'm reluctant to pull the whole piece off at this point.
One piece was an adventure. Note my inopportune placement of the launch lug between these two fins:
God the paint looks like a$$ in these close up shots.
Anyway, the lug extends about halfway into the area that will be covered with the vinyl. After cursing my lack of foresight (if I had made the lug an inch longer, it would have extended all the way through the vinyl area; that would have been easy to deal with just like I did on the APRO Lander lug) I thought about it and realize it's not so bad.
So I first cut a notch in a vinyl piece to work around the lug. Getting it in exactly the right spot took three tries; I was glad I had all those extra pieces.
With the notch, this ended up being the easiest of the fin pieces to apply, since the lug/notch dictated the position:
Then I cut a small piece of wrap for the lug. I had actually included a couple of bits of vinyl expressly for this purpose, and it's a good thing because I messed up the first and ended up getting it right on the second. With the lug covered, here's the "finyl" result (just coined a new word there):
After doing the APRO Lander and now this, I think lug-hiding is me new favorite thing.
And lastly: I realized that my engine hook (again, oh-so-beautiful in closeups) goes right down the middle of one of the green triangle pieces. So I just cut out the middle of one and put a piece on either side. If I were really ambitious I could put a middle piece on the hook itself, but I don't think I'll bother since it actually looks OK like that. Also I used up my last extra piece.
Still needs a coat of Future (which should take a bit of effort on this one) but other than that the finishing work is done. Still need to hook up the shock cord (haven't quite decided how to do that yet) and parachute and then
finished.
I think the finyl result (there it is again) looks pretty close to my original renderings. I had my doubts about this design at many points during this build, but I am very happy with the finished product.
Now let's see how it flies.